Illinois Connection

Abramson earned his Masters in Photography in 1977 from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He continued to live and work in Chicago thereafter.

Biographical and Professional Information

Michael Abramson was a photographer. He produced commercial and documentary photographs for nearly four decades starting in the early 1970’s. His work appeared in numerous national and foreign publications including ''Forbes'', ''Fortune'', ''Newsweek'', and ''Time'' and his work has been exhibited at museums and galleries including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Philadelphia Art Museum. His Chicago nightlife photos taken during the 70's are collected in the book ''Light: on the South Side.'' It is a portfolio that is a part of a record album set that captured things that no one saw or took pictures of. This work is internationally known by photo connoisseurs.Today, Abramson's photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, the California Museum of Photography, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Published Works

Light: On the South Side, Numero, 1978

Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, Abbeville Press, 1984 - written by Kathleen Aguilar

Palante: Young Lords Party, Haymarket Books, 2011 - written by Young Lords Party

Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust on Chicago's South Side From the Seventies, CityFiles Press, 2015 - written by Patricia Smith

Selected Titles At Your Library

In 1969, a group of young, primarily Puerto Rican activists founded a chapter of the Young Lords Organization in New York City. Taking inspiration from the Black Panthers, the Young Lords organized directly in Latino/a communities, challenging slum housing conditions, providing "serve the people programs" that offered food, health services, and child care, and staging dramatic takeovers of neighborhood institutions. A year later, the Young Lords founded their own bilingual newspaper Palante, meaning "onward," and in this book of the same name, presented political essays by members, oral histories of their lives leading into the party, and more than seventy photos by acclaimed photojournalist Michael Abramson. Capturing the times in which they lived and the activism they helped make so memorable, here is the first book by and about the Young Lords. --Cover, p. [2].

"Michael Abramson took these photographs with the full knowledge and consent of patrons in and outside five nightclubs on Chicago's South Side during the mid-1970s. Patricia Smith used these photographs four decades later as an inspiration for her poetry ..."--Title page verso.